The Meaninglessness of Meaning

[Kingpin]

I do not find macroevolution convincing by any means, there are a lot of assumptions and leaps there.  Evolution and natural selection in describing variations within a species, yes.  The pure mathematical probability of beneficial mutations in single cell organisms giving rise to more complex ones leaves me highly suspicious.

So, what do you think would happen if a variation were isolated from its parent species and continued in its minute changes for a million years, under different ecological pressures? I think you don't give enough thought to how long a million - or a billion - years, really is.

The extrapolation of macroevolution being possible because "there is enough time" is a presupposition that falls flat on its face.  There have been many discussions regarding it.  I understand it's still a highly debated topic, but I firmly believe it is based on unfounded assumptions.  Here is a good scientific peer reviewed article discussing it:

http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/...O-C.2012.4

Little snippet:

"Converting an enzyme to a new function is the kind of thing that should have occurred thousands of time in the course of evolution, given the vast array of biochemical functions carried out by extant enzymes. Yet recent work has shown that converting an enzyme encoded by a 1,200-nucleotide gene to a genuinely new function4 is likely to require seven or more coordinated mutations. This is true even though the starting and target enzymes have common three-dimensional proteinfolds and active-site chemistries— just no shared reaction [29].5 Getting seven specific changes in a gene 1,200 nucleotides long is a 1-in-10^22 event, not a 1-in-10,000 event. Even then it is by no means clear that significant changes in gene function can be had with just seven base substitutions."

In 2007, Durrett and Schmidt estimated in the journal Genetics that for a single mutation to occur in a nucleotide-binding site and be fixed in a primate lineage would require a waiting time of six million years. The same authors later estimated it would take 216 million years for the binding site to acquire two mutations, if the first mutation was neutral in its effect.  But six million years is the entire time allotted for the transition from our last common ancestor with chimps to us according to the standard evolutionary timescale. Two hundred and sixteen million years takes us back to the Triassic, when the very first mammals appeared. One or two mutations simply aren’t sufficient to produce the necessary changes— sixteen anatomical features—in the time available. At most, a new binding site might affect the regulation of one or two genes.